Bug 2481999 (CVE-2026-46063)

Summary: CVE-2026-46063 kernel: x86/shstk: Prevent deadlock during shstk sigreturn
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security <prodsec-ir-bot>
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Priority: low    
Version: unspecifiedCC: rhel-process-autobot, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. A deadlock can occur during the shadow stack signal return (shstk sigreturn) process on x86 systems. This happens when the kernel attempts to read the shadow stack signal frame, and a page fault occurs, leading to a recursive attempt to acquire an mmap read lock. If another CPU is waiting to write, this can result in a system deadlock, causing a denial of service.
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-05-27 15:06:21 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86/shstk: Prevent deadlock during shstk sigreturn

During sigreturn the shadow stack signal frame is popped. The kernel does
this by reading the shadow stack using normal read accesses. When it can't
assume the memory is shadow stack, it takes extra steps to makes sure it is
reading actual shadow stack memory and not other normal readable memory. It
does this by holding the mmap read lock while doing the access and checking
the flags of the VMA.

Unfortunately that is not safe. If the read of the shadow stack sigframe
hits a page fault, the fault handler will try to recursively grab another
mmap read lock. This normally works ok, but if a writer on another CPU is
also waiting, the second read lock could fail and cause a deadlock.

Fix this by not holding mmap lock during the read access to userspace.

Instead use mmap_lock_speculate_...() to watch for changes between dropping
mmap lock and the userspace access. Retry if anything grabbed an mmap write
lock in between and could have changed the VMA.

These mmap_lock_speculate_...() helpers use mm::mm_lock_seq, which is only
available when PER_VMA_LOCK is configured. So make X86_USER_SHADOW_STACK
depend on it. On x86, PER_VMA_LOCK is a default configuration for SMP
kernels. So drop support for the other configs under the assumption that
the !SMP shadow stack user base does not exist.

Currently there is a check that skips the lookup work when the SSP can be
assumed to be on a shadow stack. While reorganizing the function, remove
the optimization to make the tricky code flows more common, such that
issues like this cannot escape detection for so long.